All about the music

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It's all about the music. The Motorola E398 is what happens when a mobile phone is crossbred with an MP3 player. With what the phone maker is calling "a total music immersion experience", the E398 is aimed at the younger crowd who want more fun than function from their mobiles.

Its claim of auditory superiority is based on a pair of stereo speakers that vibrate the phone as a thumping sub-woofer would your chest. This is to give bass an extra boost in music, video or gaming.

The speakers are on either edge of the handset, throwing the sound outwards to create a 3D stereo effect. The surprise is it actually works and the speaker quality is amazing for a mobile phone.

However, it begs the question why anyone would be blaring out their music from the speakers instead of the supplied stereo ear bud headsets (that also allow you to use your phone hands-free). The other youth-oriented feature is the "rhythm lights" that flash, pulsate and glow in response either to your environment or phone functions such as gaming.

The other half of the phone's impressive hardware is the excellent 176 x 220-resolution colour display. The picture quality is sharp and clear, with backlighting that's easily visible outdoors. Just as well, since the E398 can also play back MPEG4 video clips.

Motorola throws in a 128MB TransFlash removable memory card to store all the extra multimedia files. This is a tiny flash memory card that slots into an SD card adaptor, so it can be inserted into standard readers.

The phone can be connected to a PC via the supplied USB cable or Bluetooth, but the software provided for synchronising to a PC (Windows only) is slow and prone to locking up.

A VGA-resolution camera completes the multimedia picture. It even has a built-in flash; well, more like a searchlight. Control layout and button feel are first-rate and, despite the obvious skew towards fun, the E398 is equipped with the standard suite of organiser applications.